Koetzing IT
Thomas Kötzing - Freiberufler, Analyst - MVP, CTP
Microsoft has changed or extended the screen saver capabilities and in addition Citrix has disabled the screen saver and power functionallity by default for all Windows client operating systems. Therefore, you might find yourself unable to activate the screen saver as you have done before.
Using group policy is getting more common instead of long and complicated login scripts. I often eliminate customer's login scripts into group policy and has many advantages. Nevertheless, group policy can slow down login time for different reasons. I recently showed a customer a simple way to troubleshoot login delays caused by group policy.
With Internet Explorer 11 Microsoft extended their Protected Mode feature with an Enhanced Protected Mode option that can be enabled in the enhanced Internet Explorer settings. By default, the Enhanced Protected Mode option is NOT active. If the Enhanced Protected Mode is active, then Internet Explorer will crash when Adobe Flash is loaded and plays a video. This issue is widely reported from people surfing YouTube.
Fileserver in a multi-user environment is a central topic, because of user home drives and folder redirection in place. These days virtual Windows fileserver are quickly deployed but not really configured and left with just defaults. With Server 2012 R2 it means SMB 3.02 and is better than previous versions but 2012 R2 offers more and you should use it. Especially VMWare environments are not using features because they are turned off by default. Activating them alone is also not enough if the VM hasn't the right amount of resources and I often find central fileserver with just 1 vCPU and 4 GB RAM!
With Internet Explorer 11 and above you must use the group policy Control Panel Settings within the Preferences. In previous versions of Internet Explorer and group policy you could use the Internet Explorer Maintanance but was causing a lot of trouble. The reason why Microsoft completly removed it from group policy. Instead you have to use the preferences and here are some frindly advies on what to look out for.
Microsoft in there best moments came up with pining items (shortcuts etc.) to the new Jump List. This is all crap, not just for the reason that Microsoft uses a binary key for the list and the corresponding link needs to be in place, it's also not configurable through group policies!
